The platform

Intranasal mRNA medicines for the brain.

L3 Labs is built on an intranasal mRNA-lipid-nanoparticle (mRNA-LNP) delivery platform that turns the nose into a factory for the brain's own regenerative proteins, reaching the central nervous system non-invasively without crossing the blood-brain barrier from the blood.

The problem

Why neurotrophic medicines failed for decades.

The brain's most powerful regenerative proteins, the neurotrophins, have been known for years. The barrier was never the biology. It was delivery.

The blood-brain barrier

Large protein drugs given by injection or infusion are almost entirely excluded from the brain by the blood-brain barrier, so systemic dosing cannot reach therapeutic levels in brain tissue.

Fragile, short-lived proteins

Neurotrophic proteins have very short half-lives and are degraded within minutes, making a conventional dosed protein impractical.

Invasive workarounds

Earlier attempts used neurosurgery or viral gene therapy delivered directly into the brain. Effective in principle, but invasive, costly and hard to scale.

How it works

The nose makes the medicine.

Instead of dosing a finished protein, we deliver the instructions to make it, locally, at the nose-to-brain interface.

1

Self-administered nose drops

No injections, no infusions, no surgery. A self-administered intranasal mRNA-LNP dose at home.

2

Cells in the nasal lining become the factory

The mRNA programs cells in the nasal epithelium to transiently produce and secrete a therapeutic protein on site.

3

Direct nose-to-brain transport

The locally produced protein travels the olfactory and trigeminal nose-to-brain pathways into the central nervous system, largely bypassing the systemic circulation.

4

One platform, many cargoes

Swap the mRNA, change the medicine. The same delivery system carries a growing pipeline of regenerative cargoes for the aging brain.

See the pipeline this platform powers →
Why mRNA-LNP

A modality already proven in humans.

Validated at billion-dose scale

mRNA-LNP is the same class of technology behind approved mRNA vaccines, with an established human safety and manufacturing track record. We point that proven modality at the brain.

Transient and controllable

mRNA is non-integrating and expressed transiently, so protein production is self-limiting, a useful safety property for chronic, repeat-dose brain medicines.

Non-viral and re-dosable

Unlike viral gene therapy, an LNP carries no virus and can be re-dosed, supporting the long-term dosing that brain longevity requires.

Platform economics

Because the delivery system is constant and only the mRNA cargo changes, each new program reuses a validated platform, compressing time and cost per asset.

Delivery performance

How the delivery system performs.

What the intranasal mRNA-LNP platform achieves in cell and mouse studies. The efficacy results sit on the evidence page.

Brain-only
delivery confirmed, with no detectable spread to lung, liver, heart, spleen or kidney
1,000-50,000×
increase in local target expression after a single intranasal dose
4 days
sustained protein production from a single transfection in vitro
Non-invasive
self-administered nose drops, no surgery, infusion or injection

All figures are from preclinical (cell and mouse) studies. The founding work (Bergamasco, Clark, Loo et al., University of Sydney) is available as a preprint and has not yet been peer reviewed. Nose-to-brain delivery of mRNA-LNPs that bypasses the blood-brain barrier has separately been reported in the peer-reviewed literature (Yu et al., ACS Nano, 2026).

See the full evidence →
Selected references

Grounded in the peer-reviewed literature.

Nose-to-brain delivery: Lochhead & Thorne, Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews, 2012; Thorne et al., Neuroscience, 2004.

Neurotrophin biology: Park & Poo, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2013.

mRNA-LNP delivery technology: Hou et al., Nature Reviews Materials, 2021; mRNA vaccine human safety at scale: Polack et al., New England Journal of Medicine, 2020.

Nose-to-brain mRNA-LNP delivery bypassing the blood-brain barrier: Yu et al., ACS Nano, 2026.

Investors & partners

Back a platform, not a single shot on goal.

One intranasal mRNA delivery system, a growing pipeline of brain-rejuvenating cargoes. Let's talk.

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